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At one time the pine forests were exchanged for oak, I remember; after that, nothing but pine. It was late in the day, when we left the cars at one of those solitary wayside station-houses. I shall never forget the look and feeling of the place. We had been for some miles going through a region of swamp or swampy woods, where sometimes the rails were laid on piles in the water.
It seemed that little more was necessary than for the manager or overseer to make his complaint and swear to it, and the apprentice was forthwith condemned to punishment. We never saw a set of men in whose countenances fierce passions of every name were so strongly marked as in the overseers and managers who were assembled at the station-houses.
The revolution had ravaged most of northern Mexico; long rows of rusting trucks and twisted car skeletons beside the track showed how the railway's rolling-stock had suffered in this particular vicinity; and as the train penetrated farther south temporary trestles and the charred ruins of station-houses spoke even more eloquently of the struggle.
But the invention did not stop even here; for station-houses would be built, containing good beds for noblemen and gentlemen during the night, and in the morning they would repair to a commodious police office, where a pantomimic investigation would take place before the automaton magistrates, quite equal to life, who would fine them in so many counters, with which they would be previously provided for the purpose.
I want you to steer me around the hospitals, station-houses, morgue, et cetera. There's a man missing. You've made those rounds before." "Yes, twice. When poor Bill Southford jumped from the ferry-boat; and again when a country cousin of mine had knockout drops administered to him in a Bowery dance-hall. It's a dismal quest." "I know it, but if you have nothing else on your hands this evening "
After a slow ride, of nearly eight hours, in what, in Germany, is called an express train, through a rain and clouds that hid from our view the Tyrol and the Swabian mountains, over a rolling, pleasant country, past pretty little railway station-houses, covered with vines, gay with flowers in the windows, and surrounded with beds of flowers, past switchmen in flaming scarlet jackets, who stand at the switches and raise the hand to the temple, and keep it there, in a military salute, as we go by, we come into old Augsburg, whose Confession is not so fresh in our minds as it ought to be.
We are by this time out in the wide water of the Bitter Lake, where we can go at a good speed, then the canal itself begins again and we pass one of the little station-houses where the signalmen live; it looks as if it was built out of a child's bricks, and stands on the arid banks with only a few scanty palms near.
All along the river, near every village, we saw little station-houses for the future railway. They were finished and waiting for the rails and business. They were as trim and snug and pretty as they could be.
In 1873 the seventy-one station-houses were increased to eighty-one, the line having been extended along the coasts of Cape Cod and Rhode Island. Congress having appropriated one hundred thousand dollars for the establishment of new stations, twenty-three were contracted for, giving the Maine coast five; New Hampshire, one; Massachusetts, five; Virginia, two; North Carolina, ten.
The station-houses of the New York police were certainly made receptacles for accused parties whose crimes were very different from those contemplated in their erection, just as the forts in the harbors of New York and Boston have been made "Bastilles" for state-prisoners whose arrests were signally reckless and improper.
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